FAITH IN EVERY SPECK
Hours to make and seconds to destroy, Holy Week carpets a labour of love
Overnight before the Holy Week processions pass in front of his house, Luis Álvarez works with two dozen family members and friends to create an elaborate, 35-metre-long carpet out of coloured sawdust on the street.
“A carpet is a moment of thanksgiving for all the blessings we receive all year long,” said the devout Catholic who’s been preparing Holy Week carpets for more than 30 years. “Each speck of sawdust is a prayer.”
For him and thousands of other residents of this volcano-fringed colonial city, participating in some of Guatemala’s oldest and most popular Holy Week traditions is a laborious but unmissable way to be closer to God as well as to their families and a once tight-knit community that’s increasingly diluted by mass tourism.
“All my life this will unite me with my father, and even more so with my sons,” said Francisco GonzálezFigueroa, who as a child became an aspiring cucurucho, as the processions’ float carriers are called, and now takes his two boys to help. “One is always waiting for this moment. It’s the sensations — contact with the divine, but also the music, the colours, the smells.”
He was among more than 9,100 cucuruchos who — in groups of 104 men — took turns carrying the block-long float with a 300-yearold, life-sized statue of Jesus bearing the cross. They started from the church of La Merced around 9 a.m. on Palm Sunday and were still winding their way through the cobblestoned streets after the punishingly hot tropical sun had set.
The brotherhood of Jesús Nazareno de La Merced, founded in 1675, runs one of the oldest processions in Guatemala, but there are half a dozen others in Antigua alone in the week preceding Easter — peaking with two on Good Friday.
Tens of thousands of people, of diverse ages and professions, sign up from across the region to be cucuruchos for a fee of about $5 (U.S.). That helps the various brotherhoods pay for the elaborate, everchanging float designs that accompany the sacred images and further their main mission of evangelizing.
The number of carriers — men for the main floats and women for the lighter ones that follow with images of the Virgin Mary — has been booming after processions were cancelled or restricted for three years during the pandemic.
“We asked Jesus to remove the pandemic because we wanted to carry him,” said Julio de Matta, who’s been a cucurucho for two decades. Like many participants and Antigua residents, he refers to the float as Jesus himself, a sign of his deeply felt faith.
“It’s a feeling of penance. Since we were children, our fathers instilled much devotion,” he added. Even though his turn to carry wouldn’t come for 12 hours, he was already waiting by La Merced church wearing the traditional white veil and violet tunic — the same shade as the town’s jacaranda blossoms.
Álvarez is happy to see that young people who often no longer have homes in the historic centre are interested in learning about the carpet traditions, despite the effort and cost they entail. He remembers one night in 2011 when three thunderstorms hit at intervals, forcing him to start over each time and complete the work with barely enough materials and just before the procession.
Don’t they mind seeing months of planning and overnights of painstaking work literally trampled into oblivion in less than minute?
On the contrary, he answers: “Waiting for that moment is special, waiting for Jesus to pass by.”